William Turnbull Jr.

William Turnbull, Jr. first received international attention in the 1960’s as a principal of Moore Lyndon Turnbull Whitaker (MLTW), designers of the celebrated Condominium I and Athletic Club I at Sea Ranch, an ecologically sensitive Northern California vacation community. Throughout his thirty-five-year career, Turnbull continued to collaborate with his mentor and friend Charles Moore on small and large-scale architectural projects.

However, it was the smaller rural residences, such as The Johnson House and The Hines House at Sea Ranch, that contained the most compelling explorations of three-dimensional space and spoke most clearly about architecture’s relationship to the landscape. Later as William Turnbull Associates, he continued investigating formal spatial properties, siting, landscape design, and the use of basic, unrefined building materials to fit his houses into their natural surroundings. Having grown up on a dairy farm in New Jersey, Turnbull drew inspiration from the vernacular vocabulary of everyday buildings. Yet farmhouses and barns were only points of departure for Turnbull’s poetic imagination.